


gap year

by theundiagnosable



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, everything is bad but kyle dubas has a beard so here's some plotless softness about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:01:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24558064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theundiagnosable/pseuds/theundiagnosable
Summary: William rolls in Kyle’s arms, scoots up the bed a little so they’re face to face. “You look like a lumberjack, Kyle, you know?”
Relationships: Kyle Dubas/William Nylander
Comments: 18
Kudos: 182





	gap year

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mozartspiano](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mozartspiano/gifts).



> \- [stream this on mute in the background while you read folks!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCgLa25fDHM)

William is in bed, because working out and showering and making a breakfast smoothie can only take up so much time, and he has a lot of that, recently, without hockey. Today, so far, his ways of passing it have been to watch the rectangle of sunshine from the window slowly-slowly migrating across the duvet, and to listen to the sound of Kyle on the phone, muffled through two closed doors.

He misses doing things, sometimes, but not as much as he thinks he should. It’s hard to miss other things, when he has a thing like Kyle.

The sun-square has crept all the way to the middle of the bed when the door creaks open. William doesn’t bother turning around, just listens to Kyle setting his glasses down on the bedside table, to the way that he breathes out all in a puff when the bed dips as he lies down. It’s a weary kind of breathing out, which means that the calls went badly, or at least not the way he wanted them to go. It seems like a pretty bad deal, William thinks, to be a GM and have so much work even when hockey is gone and has been gone and will be gone until who knows when.

It feels like a right puzzle piece, like a missing thing put back where it’s supposed to be, when Kyle curls around William from behind, his arm flung across William’s stomach, fingers scrabbling against William’s abs. It tickles. His ridiculous beard presses into William’s neck. That tickles too.

“You’re smiling,” Kyle murmurs, questioning, his words warm against William’s skin.

“At your beard,” William says, just as quiet, and rolls in Kyle’s arms, scoots up the bed a little so they’re face to face and then hand to face, when he settles his palm against the new scratchiness of Kyle’s cheek and whispers, around a laugh, “You look like a lumberjack, Kyle, you know?”

Kyle’s laugh isn’t a whisper at all. It’s the loud “ha” he does when he’s surprised by something funny, and it sounds kind of nasally and very unintentional and so, so dumb. It makes William feel like he just won a prize. It’s a familiar feeling.

“I don’t think I do,” Kyle says, and he still sounds tired, but happier, now, a light in his eyes. “I really don’t, have you seen lumberjacks?”

“No,” William says, biting back a smile, because Kyle clearly wants to explain this.

“They’re _huge,_ Will.” He gestures with the arm that isn’t folded on the pillow next to William’s head, yawning as he talks. “These, like, big, beefy guys – and girls, obviously, I don’t think lumberjack is a gendered word, as far as I know – and it’s interesting, actually, because the way that people in manual labour kind of professions put on muscle and strength is so different from athletes like you.” 

“Smaller asses,” William says, nodding wisely, and that makes Kyle smile all over again.

“Probably,” he agrees, and trails a hand down the bumpy path of William’s spine, comes to rest on William’s hip, his fingers pushing just the tiniest bit under William’s sweatpants, hot skin on skin. He doesn’t go anywhere with it – William doesn’t mind, they have time and time and nowhere at all to be – just exhales, his eyes fluttering shut. He got out of bed just before six, this morning, was already on a video call when William woke up properly an hour later.

“Nap?” William asks, and catches Kyle’s wrist when he moves to lift it and look at his watch. No one has ever been worse at not working. “Nap,” William decides, firm, and he can see it plain like writing on Kyle’s face as he considers arguing, then yawns again and caves. Only person who can win an argument against him is himself. Himself or William.

“Wake me in forty minutes, okay?” Kyle says, and William hums a lie of a yes then goes back to stroking his fingers against Kyle’s cheekbones, his jaw, slow and steady enough that he can see Kyle start to drift off, obviously exhausted.

It’s funny, not laughing funny, but thinking funny: William misses seeing Kyle’s face properly, back before the world went to shit and when he was shaving every day, and he mostly thinks the only good beards are on his friends during playoffs and occasionally on cool hipsters at farmers markets, but- he doesn’t hate it. He thought he’d hate it more, Kyle with a beard, or at least find him less attractive, like when a crush would get a haircut and look like a different person. He also thought he’d hate Kyle without his glasses when he first started using contacts sometimes, though, and both times he was wrong.

It’s kind of nice, it turns out, not the beard itself or the contacts or glasses or anything in particular, but the realizing that he still thinks Kyle is the most handsome and the best to look at ever, no matter what’s on his face. Nothing ugly about him. Nothing ever could be.

William’s fingernails catch in the little individual hairs of Kyle’s beard, and it makes Kyle wrinkle up his whole face. Less asleep than William thought.

“You know those are attached to my skin, right?” Kyle says, without opening his eyes. “Like, to my follicles?”

“Follicles,” William repeats, bemusedly sounding out every syllable, because it’s a funny word to say, and Kyle sounded very Sault Ste. Marie when he said it. “Ew.”

“Ew,” Kyle agrees, and opens his eyes just enough to give William a sleepy smile. 

William leans in and kisses Kyle’s mouth, one time, then again, because he’s greedy and wants to hoard the taste and sight and smell of tired soft rumpled Kyle all for himself. Like a _dragon_. Fire breathing and everything.

He kisses him again, hard, but not mean, and asks, “Would you let me shave it for you if I asked?”

“Depends how you’d ask,” Kyle says. It’s flirting, or as close as he gets. His tongue pokes out and touches his top lip like he’s trying to taste William too. “I’ll shave it if you really hate it.”

“I don’t,” William says, truthful. “I don’t hate anything about you. I couldn’t.”

Kyle rubs his thumb along William’s hipbone. “I couldn’t hate anything about you either,” he says, his eyes warm, and this time he kisses William, and this time it’s not a quick kiss at all, this time he’s being greedy too, and they have time and nowhere to be but maybe now is as good as later, for some things.

“Nap?” William asks, a different question this time, and the hand that Kyle has on his hip squeezes as he pulls William closer, slotting their legs together.

William doesn’t miss doing other things as much as he should, not at all.

The patch of sun from the window moves, slowly as anything, across the bed.


End file.
